Dream Rowan reached up and turned the mask inside out. It became a mask of Graba, with one eye squinting and the other eye wide. Then it was Graba who stood there, and no longer Rowan. She perched on the edge of the goblin stage. She reached behind her with one bird’s foot, a real bird’s foot covered with black and purple scales, like a guzzard’s. She pulled back the curtain. Behind the curtain was the River. It flooded through and covered the stage and covered the city.

Rownie woke up. He felt the cushioned chair underneath him, expecting to find the straw floor of Graba’s shack. He didn’t, and he didn’t know why—not until he gathered up all the pieces of yesterday and put them back together in his head. Then he remembered how alone he was.

Sunlight peered down through the tarnished glass of the arched ceiling, outside the railcar. It was morning. Pigeons roosted on the tops of the hanging clocks. They seemed to be ignoring him. He didn’t think they were Graba’s birds. He didn’t think so.

He crept out of the station and slipped through the bars of the rusted gate. A few scattered people were going about their morning business. He picked a direction and started walking.

Zombay was a different place to him now, and for the first time in his life Rownie felt lost in it.

Act II

Act II, Scene I

ROWNIE WAS HUNGRY. This was usually true. Hunger was a constant background noise buzzing in the back of his head and the bottom of his stomach. But yesterday he had spent more effort than usual, running toward goblins and away from Grubs, and now he needed some of it back.

He let his legs take him in search of food. He found some outside the tin-roofed house of Mary Mullusk, a pale woman who thought that her family was trying to poison her. She rarely took more than one bite of anything before she threw it out her window. Rownie got there just in time to catch a green apple as it came sailing across the street.

“I wouldn’t eat that,” Miss Mullusk called to him. She sounded calm for someone who believed herself surrounded by poisoners. “It’s a tainted thing.”

Rownie bit into the apple, smiled, and shrugged. It tasted fine. It tasted perfect. She shook her head and left the window. He waited to see if she would toss away any other tainted things, but she didn’t.